In this video lesson we are going to look at the topic ‘roundedness’, sometimes also called labialization of vowels or in short: rounded and unrounded vowels in English.

You will learn how the lips are involved when forming rounded vowels (protruding or compressed) and how the lips are shaped when unrounded vowels are produced (spread or neutral).

In general, we can say that front vowels are unrounded in English. Then we are going to look at the table containing all the vowel sounds of British English and the vowel chart so you can see which vowels go in which group.

There is also a special symbol (= a dot) in the vowel chart which shows you if a sound is rounded or unrounded. Whilst it is important to know about roundedness to help you produce the sounds correctly, this feature does not lead to contrast in English (i.e. it does not lead to a change in meaning).

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